How often do you let your work week just kinda happen to you?

I call these “default” weeks. Where you just go into autopilot and cruise through the days. Nothing terrible happens when you do this. But nothing stellar happens either! But great salespeople don’t allow this. They’re control freaks about what happens in their week!

Burnout is a real thing. In fact, many sales people are experiencing it right now. You know how it goes…you wake up in the morning and you are already tired before you get out of bed. The thought of dealing with customers sucks the life out of you…even though you are making good money!

Salespeople are some of the most determined, resilient and hardworking people on the planet. We work hard, we focus hard. We pour all we have into our success, day and night. It’s push, push, push all the way, all the time. But sometimes, we pour more than we have. Here’s how to stop sales burnout before it begins.

How do you define sales success? If it’s solely by your bank account, you’re in danger of burnout and even failure. How do you stay on track? Redefine the meaning of success in your sales career…

For those of us in sales, we do it because we love it. We love the people and helping them improve their lives. We love the financial rewards that come with being really good at our job. We love the dynamic environment that is constantly changing. Sometimes we love it so much and become so wrapped-up with capturing and converting every single sell that we don’t know when to stop. 

One of my favorite things to do is people watch. One of the things that happens when you watch people is you tell yourself a story about them. Buyers are people and because they are people, they are storytellers. Humans tell stories. We can’t help it.

Customers lie because there is an underlying fear issue. A perceived lack of safety breeds fear. A lack of safety is due to a lack of trust. We don’t tend to lie to people in safe environments, nor do we lie to people whom we trust. There are three main ways that salespeople can increase trust, thus increasing safety, thus increasing honesty.

Asking the wrong questions will get you the wrong answers. Asking the right questions, can help you to get to know your customer better and make the sale. The most important thing that you can learn when you’re trying to sell anything, is not what the customer is moving to, but what the customer is coming from.

Most salespeople simply do not question in a strategic way. They don’t plan the questions that they want to ask during the sales presentation.

As a sales practitioner for 30 years, and having taught sales techniques to thousands of people on multiple continents, I have witnessed some great presentations and a whole lot of horrible ones. Let me address a series of very popular questions that are, in fact, NOT the most important in sales (although one would think so given their popularity among salespeople).